* * *
Rude Thompson’s “Letter from Anguilla,” written in pencil out in the bush, made no mention of the explosive meetings between the police and the people of the eastern portion of the island that week. Rude Thompson’s “Letter from Anguilla” was mute about the raid Gaynor Henderson had organized against the police station on Thursday evening, simply because Rude Thompson knew nothing about it. Rude Thompson’s “Letter from Anguilla” was oblivious to the standoff between official forces and dissidents on Welches Hill on both Tuesday and Wednesday, because he did not want to give the government in St. Kitts more information than it already had about the situation on the island. Therefore, Rude Thompson’s “Letter from Anguilla” did not mention his or Alwyn Cooke’s condition as fugitives, and it remained ambiguous as to whether either of them were still in Anguilla. Instead, his article focused that week on the events of Saturday, February 4, 1967; on the ill-advised use of tear gas by the task force; on the excessive use of force by the police, both that night and on the following days, when they imprisoned without reason just about anyone they could lay their hands on.
Rude Thompson’s “Letter from Anguilla” made no mention, either, of the hideous attacks that took place on the night of Saturday, February 11, exactly one week after the Statehood Queen Show, primarily because the article had already been published when a group of young men hijacked Rude’s green Sweptside pickup truck and made rounds of the island targeting individuals who were either outspoken supporters of the union with St. Kitts—Bradshers—or were merely suspected of siding with Bradshaw, the tyrant. That night, the rascals drove past the house of Constable LaRue and fired a blaze of shots at his property, before driving down the road toward Crocus Hill, the highest point of the island, on the north coast, where one of Anguilla’s very few guesthouses was operated by a conservative politician, a member of Bradshaw’s Labour Party and former representative of the island. The Sea View guesthouse was vandalized before the rebels decided to waste the rest of their ammo against the concrete building, the zinc roof, the shutterless windows. It was a miracle that no one, not the couple who owned it, not their seven-year-old son, not the one and only guest at the time, was hurt inside Sea View. On their way back to the east, the hoodlums stopped by the largest grocery store on the island and looted it, taking food, kerosene, anything at all, really, in the name of liberty. The ideal had been ravished in full.
If they had had any time, any choice, the people of Anguilla—of all of Anguilla, east and west, north and south, The Valley and beyond—would have voiced their indignation, their consternation, at the events of the night of Saturday, February 11. Because, while they were overwhelmingly against their association with St. Kitts, Anguillians—God-fearing, right-thinking, righteous—were not prepared for their island to sink to the depths of banditry to achieve recognition. Alas, fate was equally outraged as Anguillians would have been, and before anyone had the chance to know for certain what had happened the night before, dawn broke from the east of Island Harbour and greeted the village with the threatening presence of a two thousand–ton F32 frigate from the British navy, the HMS Salisbury, whose two hundred–plus crew included scores of trained marines who, soon enough, came ashore onto the beach at Island Harbour. One gunshot would have been enough to trigger a bloodbath. But it was too early for that, and the irresponsible thugs who had gone wild the night before still slept lazily in their beds, and the people of Island Harbour, caught halfway between awe and disbelief, greeted the soldiers with a genuine, spontaneous sing-along of a well-known ditty: “God Save the Queen.”
While British marines, armed to their teeth, responded to Inspector Edmonton’s cry for assistance and patrolled the goat paths of Island Harbour, of East End, where they found little other than harmless locals voicing their common national anthem, Alwyn Cooke checked the few hiding spots where, he knew, Rude Thompson would be laying low. The meeting of the two haphazard leaders of a revolution gone astray took place before, even, the marines had reached the government’s headquarters in The Valley.
De whole t’ing gone out of hand, Rude, and Rude looked in wonder at Alwyn, as he asked him to hand himself to the police. Dem boys gone out at night shootin’ at random people, you know. Rude didn’t know. Alwyn didn’t know, either. But everyone suspected, everyone had heard the buzz of gossip which distorted the facts, embellished here, elaborated there, but which always carried an element of truth. I know dis ain’ wha’ you planned. I sure know dis ain’ wha’ we want for Anguilla. Is time we make it stop, an’ start all over again.
By the time the police task force regained control of the island, by the time Inspector Edmonton, supported by fifty British marines deployed along the eastern portion of the island, entered Island Harbour first, East End later, Ylaria Cooke had already received word from her husband. All in all, the police made fourteen arrests that morning, but the leaders of the insurrection, Rude Thompson and Alwyn Cooke, were nowhere to be found. Any other day, Ylaria Cooke would have greeted the knock on the door, which she knew came from Inspector Edmonton’s hand, with a tirade so threatening he would have lacked the balls to ask for her husband. But this time, Alwyn Cooke had appointed her with the task of making the authorities understand that You men kyan search an’ search all day long if you wan’, you know. But you ain’ findin’ me man unless he come to you. Alwyn Cooke was not about to trust these newly arrived white men from Britain with his life, and he sure as hell was not going to allow Inspector Edmonton to come anywhere near him, unless he was certain he would be treated fairly. Is only one man me husband trus’: Solomon Carter. If Solomon Carter come wit’ he, he come wit’ Rude Thompson to de station to clear up dis whole mess.
Before the end of the day, the HMS Salisbury, with its full contingent of royal marines, sailed from Island Harbour, bound for Antigua. Its call on Anguilla was not recorded in its logbook, and has been lost forever in the fissures of history. Meanwhile, Sol Carter, Alwyn Cooke, and Rude Thompson were put together in a room, where they awaited the interrogation of Inspector Edmonton. For over twenty hours, they waited. Twenty hours of arguing, of reasoning, of discord. Whether this was a strategy by the inspector to make them talk among themselves and thus extract information, or just a punishment for the pains they had caused him remains unknown. The fact is that those twenty hours provided the most productive dialogue the three men would ever enjoy. Unbeknownst to Inspector Edmonton, he had paid the revolution a great service.
CHAPTER VIII
KICK ’EM OUT!
The weeks and months that followed the ghost-visit paid by the HMS Salisbury to the tranquil shores of Anguilla took the island into uncharted territory. Inspector Edmonton and his police task force had regained nominal control of the island and, indeed, an agreement between Sol Carter, Alwyn Cooke, and Rude Thompson had put a momentary end to the spells of violence that characterized the days (and nights) that followed the abortive Statehood Queen Show. Nevertheless, there was a palpable tension in the air that impregnated everything in the daily routine of the islanders, from the slow glide of the elderly woman on the edge of town as she stepped outside in the early morning to tend to her goats, to the parsimonious stride of the youths trying to look cool on the way to school, to the methodical strike of the fellow down the road breaking the ground with a sledgehammer to set the foundations of an extension to his one-bedroom house—everything seemed to be done under the burdening shadow of a suspicion, in the troubling knowledge that somet’in’ jus’ ain’ right. It was the end of February, and there was still a chill in the air, although the rainy season had come to an end; but in this lousy atmosphere everything seemed stale, and the days dragged with a surreal sense of being both long and short—short because nothing could get accomplished with this heavy load, this utter discomfort, on your back, and long because every minute that went by in this venomous environment carried the weight of an hour, of several hours, making every day an endless ordeal.
Alwyn Cooke was very much
under the effect of this draining atmosphere when he sought advice from the only man he had come to trust in Anguilla in the midst of all this trouble: Solomon Carter. I see everyone goin’ crazy in Anguilla as de days go by an’ in no time at all we all goin’ dead under de rule of St. Kitts, you know. We mus’ do somet’in’ quick-quick.
And double-quick it was that Solomon Carter came up with the idea that would keep the whole island busy for the days to come. If Anguilla soon dead as you say, why we don’ go make a big funeral?
It was a stroke of genius. The idea spread around the island like a virus. Every sermon in every church in Anguilla, from O’Farrell’s Anglican congregation in East End, to the Methodist church in South Hill, to the Seventh Day Adventist temple down by The Valley, to the Church of the God of Prophecy in West End, and among the few Catholics around Wallblake, all of them, without exception, touched upon the small matter of a general strike to paralyze the island and to express, graphically, the unequivocal rejection of the Anguillian people, their sense of bereavement at the thought of forming a single state with St. Kitts, through a public, all-embracing funeral procession.
Even Rude Thompson, ever the antagonist, had to give it to Alwyn the day they met to discuss, as always, the corrections Alwyn deemed necessary with Rude’s use of colons and commas in his latest “Letter from Anguilla.” Disgusted, Rude let out an impolite I ain’ know why you always wan’ make changes like dat, like dis you piece or somepin’, but soon enough he loosened the frown on his face and brightened up with an enthusiastic Is good idea you have at last, Al.
Alwyn thought of giving credit where credit was due by admitting, “Is Sol idea, Rude—is Sol idea,” but he suspected Rude would be less convinced about it if he knew from where the idea had come, and Alwyn feared Rude might even try to boycott the whole plan, or come up with some alternative one, a violent version of a funeral, a sort of bandit’s farewell, or some other nonsense like that, and Rude hadn’t even asked who had come up with the idea, he just assumed it was Alwyn’s baby without Alwyn saying anything at all, so instead of turning Rude’s attention in a dangerous direction, he just took the credit and, You better not let you trigger-happy frien’s ruin everyt’in’ for us.
And he didn’t. Because Rude Thompson believed in this plan, in this new form of civil disobedience, in this challenge to the authorities, more than he had believed in anything he had done so far in the name of the revolution. Hence, on Monday, February 27, it was Rude Thompson who held the banner at the front of a procession in which thousands of Anguillians—Anguillian women, Anguillian children, Anguillians from West End, from South Hill, from Sandy Ground, from Blowing Point, old and young—came together at Burrowes Park, right at the heart of The Valley, and marched all around town. They walked past the small white building that was the government house, next to the simple wooden structure that read Courthouse on the outside, and up to the one-story police station, which was adjacent to the island’s only prison, recently visited by the likes of Gaynor Henderson and Whitford Howell. And then they crossed over to the near side of Wallblake Airport and went right past the old Wallblake plantation house, through the dusty roads that lead to the factory, the largest store on the island with its long structure divided into several aisles, next to the remains of the old cotton gin, where once upon a time the (meager) island riches were obtained. And then they continued northward, through a narrow road that led to the Landsome House, home to the island’s warden, who would be presiding over the raising of the new flag of the associated state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla—the very same green-yellow-and-blue flag which Alwyn Cooke had soaked in gasoline and set aflame while he hung precariously from the corner of his white Ford truck in the total darkness of the darkest night yet in Anguilla’s history, Saturday February 4, 1967, just three weeks before, during the failure of epic proportion that had been the Statehood Queen Show.
A failure, too, was to be the symbolic act during which the Union Jack would be taken down and replaced by the tri-island-state flag, as a representation of the handing over of power from the old colonial master to the new indigenous autonomy. But the thousands—quite literally half the population of Anguilla—who gathered in their most formal outfits, fully adorned to attend the largest funeral they had ever seen, to put an end to their wishes—to bury their dreams—would not allow the staging of a political transition that was already taking place. So, Alwyn Cooke, not in his usual gray trousers but clad in equally well-pressed black ones, with his trademark white shirt—this time with long sleeves—and wearing a discrete, narrow black tie, was joined at the front by an old matron from South Hill, Cleothilda Hart, whose slow steps set the pace for the sea of people behind them, as the elaborate arrangement that hung from her black wide-brimmed hat bobbled at the rhythm of her burdened knees and orchestrated the motion of the widows and widowers who carried over their shoulders the black coffin in which lay—dead—Anguilla’s future. Banners, old and new ones, crowded the street and voiced—in large black lettering—the same old concerns, the same old requests Anguillians had futilely expressed for months. But none was larger than Rude’s banner at the front, which he carried almost like a staff, and which read in huge, dripping red letters: ANGUILLA R.I.P.
All of a sudden, in the middle of the procession, an unintelligible wail broke out from the back of the crowd, filling the hot afternoon air with a sense of both hope and despair, which spread quickly among the crowd, until the tune became familiar at the front too, and Alwyn Cooke and Cleothilda Hart, hand in hand, sang in unison for God to save the queen. Rude Thompson, puzzled at the choice of words and uncertain as to whether this was really the message he wanted delivered that very instant, hesitated for a moment, when, from behind, emerged the thin figure of Glenallen Rawlingson, only just fifteen years old but already tall, if lanky, and with that anthropoid gait of his, and, with both hands, he grabbed hold of the wooden pole wherefrom hung the banner announcing the death of Anguilla, and he relieved Rude from his duty, not giving him much of an option, before moving ahead, pole in hand, shouting from the top of his lungs, “God save the queen!”
So it was that all through the day on Monday, February 27, 1967, a peaceful, though visibly volatile crowd of Anguillians stood before the warden’s house with the candid—almost childish—intention of preventing a (childish) representation of that which above all else they most wanted to avoid, simply because they were not entitled to do anything—not even give their opinion—about the real thing. And so it was, too, that three thousand Anguillians stood for hours on Monday, February 27, 1967 before the warden’s house, to prevent him from raising the flag of the new governing entity on the island, performing their defiance by chanting continuously a tune that prayed for the health, for the well-being, of the queen whose very government had been the main, the direct culprit of the neglect in which Anguilla had found itself for the previous three hundred years. Go figure.
The warden of Anguilla, intimidated by a crowd larger than anyone had ever seen on the island, thought better than lowering the Union Jack from its flagpole and, instead, let things be for a while. In fact, for a long while, well into the night, when no official flag should fly loosely at all. But this was a special case, and the situation was, quite literally, extraordinary, and so, to commemorate the occasion expediently, the warden of Anguilla awoke in the middle of the night and peeked out of his window, and he made certain that the crowd had dispersed, and indeed every single one of the three thousand people who had congregated before his house earlier that day—or the day before, even, because it was four o’clock on Tuesday morning—had gone home, or they had gone to the Banana Rod, or they had gone somewhere else, but they were certainly not there, before his house, and if some of them were still around, they were not enough in numbers to intimidate him, to mitigate his initiative, to stall his sense of duty, so he called on the police officer who was his guard for the night, and Constable LaRue, our utility man, rubbed his eyes open and shook his head out of i
ts slumber, and he stood firm, attentive, rolling the sleep he had cleared from his eyes into a small ball with the fingers of his left hand as the warden ordered him to go outside, to lower the flag of the United Kingdom, and to hoist the flag of the associated state of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, with its laughable three little palm trees in the middle, while he, the warden, officiated the act in his pajamas. (I kid you not. This one is recorded—go look it up, if you must, St. Thomas.)
Naturally, this did not go down well with Anguillians—so the warden made no friends among the people he was supposed to ward, and his days in Anguilla were numbered, and the dice had been cast, and the dice were tumbling. News spread around Anguilla with the speed of light, which is why in the total darkness of four o’clock in the morning on an island with little electric power, no one knew what had happened. However, as soon as the day broke on Tuesday, February 28, and the first rays of sunlight illuminated the horizon line far out in the east, the supple waving of the three silly little palm trees on a green-yellow-and-blue flag against the background of the warden’s house left its imprint of anger and indignation on the Anguillian population, most of whom had gone to sleep triumphantly the night before, filled with a sense that, for once, their wishes had been voiced clearly enough for somebody to listen, for the British to understand. But Lahrd, how so dey treat us so? How so de white man wait for Anguilla to be in she sleep to stab she in de back? I t’ought de man here to protect us! But he ain’ protectin’ nobody but heself. De man a Judas! De man a traitor!
The Night of the Rambler Page 18